The Visual Jewishness of Mark Podwal (Image journal)

Mark Podwal’s earliest memory of making art is of drawing boats with many sails at age four. “I remember drawing a ship on a wall, but that may be a fantasy,” says Podwal, who is both a prominent artist and a dermatologist with a practice on New York’s Upper East Side. Another story is definitely not fictive: An illness kept him from attending the first days of kindergarten, and as a result, his name was left off of the roster. “When my teacher read out the attendance list every morning, my name was never called,” he says. “I participated in whatever my classmates were instructed to do. But until the day my teacher noticed my drawing of a train, I was invisible to her.” And so it seemed to Podwal—even at age five—that his existence depended on his art.